


Weft

by Domenika Marzione (domarzione)



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Gen, POV Nile Freeman, Post-Movie, Team Dynamics, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-25
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:40:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27185326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/domarzione/pseuds/Domenika%20Marzione
Summary: "It would be easier if it were all hostage rescues and defending the helpless and making obvious choices that result in obvious good. But it's rarely that easy. The easy stuff generally gets taken care of. It's the rest that falls to us, along with whatever hindsight chooses to reveal. We try to use our experience to see a picture bigger than a lifetime and act accordingly and hope and pray that it is to the good."History is written by the victors, but it lives on in the survivors and their stories become heirlooms to nations. What will the history books say about your time in Afghanistan? What stories will the daughters of those you helped tell? What will you remember when that slash across your throat isn't the defining moment of your existence anymore? What will the people of this region say of this time? What can we do to make it less full of sorrow? And can we live with the failure - or the success?"
Comments: 25
Kudos: 151





	Weft

"What were you doing in Sao Paulo in 1834?" Nile asks, not taking her eyes off the road. 

The deuce-and-a-half is sturdy and will survive a collision with anything coming the other way on this dark country road, but that's part of the problem. Here in the middle of the night in barely-on-the-map southern Colombia, it's more likely to be a person or someone's livestock than another vehicle and their entire reason for being down here is to not make things worse for the locals. They're trying for 'make things better,' of course, but Andy has stressed the low expectations needed for these kinds of missions and Nile has taken her cue from the fact that Nicky and Joe aren't singing in a more upbeat key. She's getting better at reading between the lines among her new people, hearing what isn't said. And if Andy's pragmatism-bordering-on-nihilism isn't being tempered by Joe's optimism or Nicky's faith (in them, in the righteousness of their task, in God), then 'not adding to the misery' probably is their threshold of success and Nile can do her part by not running over someone's grandfather or their goats. 

But vigilance in the dark is exhausting and if she's bone-tired, then Joe probably is, too. He's riding a very literal shotgun, eyes on the peripheries of the headlights' glare as she focuses on the illuminated road. Andy and Nicky are in the back, presumably passed out; it's been a very long couple of days for them all but Nicky's spent almost all of it tensed behind a rifle scope and Andy just gets more tired than they do now. Joe'd given her a ruthless verbal beat-down when she'd tried to pull rank and ride up front with Nile to let Nicky and Joe rest together and it had been both weird and uncomfortable to be stuck in the middle of that. It was one of those times when she can see the team trying to adjust to Booker's absence as opposed to just Andy's mortality, watching them try on unfamiliar roles and make them work even if they don't seem to fit. Andy's clearly not used to Joe challenging her authority like this and Joe's just as clearly not used to doing it and the Booker-shaped hole in the room had practically had a force field around it none of them dared touch. Joe had won the argument, but it had been a bloody victory that Nile thinks they are all still recovering from. 

"Brazil in '34? Kinda we're doing now," Joe answers after a beat. "Fighting bad guys so that civilians can live their lives." 

She can't take her eyes off the road, so she just snorts to express the insufficiency of that answer. "Why were you in the New World at all?" 

The whole history of the gang is no more known to her than Copley, where most of her initial intel came from, but unlike him she's got the right to ask questions and she's getting less shy about doing so. 

"See the place, more or less," Joe answers and there's a note in his voice that makes her shoot a look over. He can hear it, too, because he looks back and gives her a grim smile. "It was right after Booker's boy died and we decided to take him as far away from Europe as we could go, try to get him to look at the outside world instead of only seeing his own grief. We didn't want to go back to Asia because Andy would've gotten maudlin about Quynh. So, South America. Lots of action back then, so we figured we'd find something to do."

There's a whole Homeric epic in what he's leaving out of that explanation, but Nile lets it go. "What was it like?"

She has to slow down because the headlights are throwing some serious potholes into sharp relief. Even at walking speed they still roll over those canyons like it's an amusement park ride and she spares a thought for her teammates in the back. (Nicky's a light sleeper, but he can also go back to sleep at the drop of a hat; it drives Joe nuts even after a thousand years because he is the opposite on both counts. Andy sleeps like the dead but is also an insomniac, so either she was already up or she's still out.) Joe holds his shotgun aimed at the ceiling while they rumble through the rough stretch because trigger discipline isn't enough in these spots. 

"The ride over was terrible," Joe finally says once the road evens out enough to accelerate again and he doesn't have to shout over the suspension. "Booker and Andy were drunk for the first few weeks, then they ran out of their stores and had to buy grog off the crew, so then they were only drunk half the time. We all got sick at the first port call and let me tell you, dysentery aboard ship is one of those fates worse than death you want to avoid." 

"I've got a good idea," she assures him. "I shared portapotties with a couple thousand Marines downrange." 

She can hear him chuckle. 

"Brazil was a surprise, I'll admit," Joe goes on. "I think I expected colonies in the Americas would be more exotic for being so far away, but they weren't. The European parts of places like Peking or Edo still looked Chinese and Japanese, but Sao Paolo looked just like any other part of Portugal except the brown people there didn't look like me. Same architecture, same signs, even the same clothes because fashions traveled at the same rate of speed we had. It might as well have been Oporto."

She spares a look at the odometer because they're navigating old school down here, by paper maps and flashlights because Google has no more idea of where this place is than the government in Bogota. There's supposed to be a turn 137 kilometers from where they started and she's supposed to warn Joe at the century mark; they're at 83 klicks right now. 

"So why were you rappelling through windows in some Portuguese colony?" 

Joe sticks his head out his window and takes a long look at something through his NVGs before answering. 

"They were having a very loud and protracted debate over whether they _were_ a Portuguese colony," he says. "The Emperor abdicated in favor of his toddler, the Argentines were meddling because they could, the Americans were telling everyone else they couldn't... It was a fun time." 

Which could be sarcasm or could be meant honestly and could be both and Nile's still figuring out how to decide. She's still learning her new team, who they are while everyone's in the shit and who they are away from the fight and it's hard because all of that's in flux now. None of them are who they thought they were the day before she got her throat cut and some days it feels like all of them are made of jello, holding the shape of the vessel they were poured into but only barely and not without a lot of wobble. It's easier to focus on Andy's newfound mortality and Nile's newfound lack thereof, but that's the trick - those are the obvious things that distract from everything else. And it's the everything else that has brought them to where they are now, Booker drinking off his exile in Paris and the rest of them choosing to fight rather than take the time to heal. Nile knows what an operational pace like this does to people; she lived it in the Corps with the constant deployments and field exercises and Yet Another Trip to Bridgeport. It dulls the battle brain and it obliterates the rest because you're too worn down to think, to be anything or anyone out of uniform. And they might say that they're doing this because of Andy, because of her newly-restored sense of purpose and focus and her bucket list despite the fact that she could have another sixty years ahead of her, but that's not the whole truth and Nile thinks they all kind of know that. But she's not going to be a hypocrite and start talking about work-life balance and all that other mental health stuff, not when she's using the excuse as much as Joe and Nicky are. As much as Andy is, if they're being really honest. None of them want to sit down and take an unflinching look in a mirror, the others because of what they might see and Nile because of what she no longer will. So they take hopeless-case missions in countries pretending they're not a bad week away from being a failed state and tell themselves that they're trying to be good guys in places nobody else wants to. 

"Hundred klicks coming up," she reports. Joe grunts acknowledgement. 

She has to slow down again around the 110-kilometer mark on the odometer because the road suddenly narrows and the asphalt disappears, like they crossed a border between the present and the past. They move at a snail's pace because the dirt road's barely wide enough for the truck; between the utter blackness of the night that the headlights only seem to make worse and the noise of the trees scraping along the sides of the truck, it feels like a horror movie. She says as much to Joe, joking that it's a toss-up which one of them dies first, the black girl or the brown boy, and it's a good thing they'll both get up afterward. 

"Is that a set piece of the genre?" Joe asks, sounding distracted because he is distracted. Nile belatedly remembers that Joe's pop culture references are very different from hers if they exist at all. (They must exist, but they might be a few hundred years out of date. Her new team functions well in the present because they work very hard at it, but it's a foreign language to them and they sometimes don't have the jargon that marks a native speaker.) 

"Not like a fixed rule, like sonata movements or something like that," she answers once they clear a tree with a branch so low it brushed the roof like a car wash bristle roller. "But yeah. White dudes die last and at least one of them will live to the end."

Anything Joe is going to say to that has to be stowed because there's a tree down across the road they're going to have to get out and move. Which means waking up Nicky and Andy because it'll take two of them to move the tree and someone's going to have to provide overwatch while someone has to stay behind the wheel. Nicky's already moving around, but Andy has to be shaken awake and grumbles at the interrupted nap but goes to sit behind the wheel without complaint once the situation is explained. 

Nile puts on her NVGs to sit on the cab roof with her rifle. It's a newish one to her and it still feels weird for being so light and small compared to the M4 she was legally married to since she was a Boot. She's not a gearhead and had asked for an M4 when the others had started kitting her out; it's familiar and she can use it proficiently and that's all a girl really needs. But Nicky, of all people, had insisted she look at other options now that she had them and try out something that might fit her better. ("I'm not taking crap from a guy whose combat aesthetic is 'it worked in 1090, it'll work now!'") But Nicky - and Joe and Andy and Copley - are right, the more modern options are easier to deal with when you're not a six-foot dude and so she's carrying the Textron because that's what felt best after a few weeks of testing and tens of thousands of rounds fired. It rests easily in her hands as she looks at and listens to everything that's not Joe and Nicky dragging a tree trunk somewhere where there's enough clearance on the side of the road for the truck to get past it. 

When they finish, Andy says she'll stay behind the wheel and Nile can ride shotgun and Joe looks both outraged and unsurprised at being maneuvered around like this. But Nicky ends the argument before it starts by heading back toward the rear of the truck and Nile thinks Joe follows more because of that than anything else; it's about what Nicky wants/needs and not Andy's power play. Nicky doesn't ask for things, at least not out loud and in words. But this is him asking and Andy's lack of smugness at the victory says that she saw it, too. She didn't win the argument with Joe; Nicky did. 

Nile has to explain the odometer and the turnoff as Andy puts the truck in gear and when they hit that point she's a little glad she's not behind the wheel. The turn is not a turn, it's a Y-junction where one leg continues on and the other climbs straight up the freaking mountain without getting any wider. Nile doesn't want to look out her window because there's nothing there - no road, just darkness and air. There's no guardrail and no clearance and God help them all if there's anything coming the other way because there isn't enough space for even a goat to pass. Andy shifts gears like a pro racer as she drives. 

"We go over the side, gonna be a helluva time replacing all our stuff," Nile says instead of reminding Andy that she's no longer immortal. 

"Relax, kid," Andy drawls. "Most of the world has roads like this. You'll get used to it." 

Their destination is an abandoned village and they arrive a couple of hours before civilian dawn. It's not some old place abandoned because of economics or deforestation or anything natural or benign; it's empty because the residents fled the gang warfare that's filled the vacuum the peace deal with FARC created. These aren't pioneer cabins or mud brick homes, they're prefab houses that had electricity and running water and satellite dishes and driveways that held cars that once drove up and down the mountain road like Andy did. It's a village that was disputed territory between two gangs and Nile doesn't know which one won and what kind of victory this could possibly look like to any of them. Copley had shown them the newspaper clippings of mass murders, given them briefs on police that were either ganged-up or giving up, of a national response that didn't exist this far from Bogota. "It's _plata o plomo_ all over again," he'd said. "Except Escobar had a plan and a goal, however reprehensible it was. These people are seemingly without greater purpose." 

They're not here to liberate the village like some old western or to stop the gangs entirely; they're here to try to keep every other town in the area from following this one's fate. To not create more corpses while trying to not create more refugees. To keep things from getting worse. 

They clear the village house to house, but it's well and truly abandoned and so it feels more like MOUT training than carrying the threat of actual combat. By the time they finish, the sky is a pretty shade of lilac. 

"This is what you meant by 'depends on the century,'" she says to Joe as they unpack the truck into the house they're going to squat in. She realizes it's context-free outside her head and prepares to elaborate, but Joe gives her a quick smile to indicate he understands. 

"I'll let you ask Andy about Chaucer and chivalry and courtly love," he says and _winks_ and now she has to ask Andy about Chaucer. But then he sobers. "It would be easier if it were all hostage rescues and defending the helpless and making obvious choices that result in obvious good. But it's rarely that easy. The easy stuff generally gets taken care of. It's the rest that falls to us, along with whatever hindsight chooses to reveal. We try to use our experience to see a picture bigger than a lifetime and act accordingly and hope and pray that it is to the good.

"History is written by the victors, but it lives on in the survivors and their stories become heirlooms to nations. What will the history books say about your time in Afghanistan? What stories will the daughters of those you helped tell? What will you remember when that slash across your throat isn't the defining moment of your existence anymore? What will the people of _this_ region say of _this_ time? What can we do to make it less full of sorrow? And can we live with the failure - or the success?" 

They have been briefed on the gangs and their hierarchies and their native territories and their histories, they've seen the maps and the satellite imagery. But that's all kind of academic here on the ground. They have to find a way to make all that intel real, to look at the photographs on the laptop that came from Copley and look at the pictures Nicky takes through his scope and try to figure out if it's the same guy or a cousin, if the house is the headquarters with a paint job or if the map is wrong. From a professional standpoint Nile is learning _so much_ when they're out in the field, so many tasks that had been out of her MOS or above her pay grade and now she's getting tutored by experts. Even tasks that aren't going to become hers within the team, like sniping, are still things she can learn from. She spots for Nicky instead of Joe and it's a lesson in stillness and patience as much as the actual technical details of reading distance and environmental conditions and learning what Nicky needs to know and how he wants it given. It's also a long afternoon with Nicky in which she learns what he's like when he's doing this, which is very much not the same Nicky as when he's sitting at the dinner table or even when they're planning an op or in transit. Nicky's never really chatty, not like Joe, but with his rifle in position he's so self-contained he might have his own gravity well. She knows he's not losing his situational awareness but spotting for him feels protective and she can see why Joe wants to do it - and how much it means that he's letting her try in his place. 

It takes a few weeks to get the lay of the land, a few more weeks to start figuring out their own best practices and how they want to operate. They need at least one more vehicle and Copley sends couriers to drive a pair of technicals up from Ecuador along with some other supplies they've belatedly realized they'll need. They find their ways around the nearby villages and towns so that they don't have to drive all the way to Pasto for fresh foods and won't have to live on cans and the frankly hilarious collection of international MREs they have in bulk. (The Scandinavian and French MREs are all kinds of weird fun, but it's a little comforting to know that her thousand-year-old teammates still appreciate the beauty of the American chili mac MRE.) 

Figuring out where to buy fruits and veggies is part of the larger process of getting HUMINT (or at least RUMINT) and this is where Nile is in her element because this is what she was trained to do and her Spanish is a lot better than her Pashto. Andy, unsurprisingly, prefers to not have to do this kind of work but the few times she does Nile is blown away by her gentleness and how you can almost see the woman she might have been with the way she talks to the older women like one of them. Andy's not a kid biologically; she might have been a mother or a grandmother once upon a time. Nile knows better than to say a word or so much even indicate that she's had these kinds of thoughts, even to the guys. 

The local warlords, a gang subcontracting for the ELN, have imposed a curfew on the surrounding towns to make them easier to control. It's not something the locals are eager to confess to, although they do obliquely warn outsiders to be clear of the region before late at night. The team obeys the curfew at first because they're not ready to do anything about it, but eventually they test the system - carefully, since they don't know how rational or disproportionate the response might be. They escalate slowly from there, withdrawing from the towns where they'd done their shopping so there can be no guilt by association and then stepping up their attacks. Andy wants to go for their resources first, partially to test their logistics but mostly to test their resolve. Being a warlord is expensive and none of these subcontractor gangs are rolling in dough even with the drugs and human trafficking, their primary sources of income. How badly do they want this when it's not getting them anything fungible, when it's actually costing them what they already have? 

They burn a few coca fields and take out a weapons depot and there aren't many casualties, although Joe rising from the dead scares one dude with poor trigger discipline into taking out a few colleagues. It's getting easier for Nile to do this, to walk into surefire danger without dread and to not flinch too much at the bullets aimed at her that still fucking _hurt_. But it's not easy and she doesn't always deal well with it in the aftermath. The others are always kind to her about it and she doesn't know if it's them or if it's them-after-Booker and if there's a real difference anymore. She doesn't like being the weak link and doesn't always want the comfort, but she always gets found by one of them if she tries to hide. Joe talks and Nicky listens and Andy teaches her how to make arrowheads out of beef bones or some other skill thousands of years old that she insists might still come in useful some day. 

They expand their operations until they aren't dealing with the local subcontractors but the ELN themselves and things get ugly and there is collateral damage they will all carry with them, but the end result is that the Colombian government is sending a permanent presence because the fires they're setting can be seen from the International Space Station. It's not a solution, not the kind that actually fixes anything, but it will make things less awful for the civilians caught in this fight and that was the goal. 

The army rolls in and the team packs up to roll out and Nile makes everyone laugh with her vehement and profane refusal to drive the deuce-and-a-half down the mountain. 

**Author's Note:**

> [A notice for this fic was posted to tumblr if you'd like to like or reblog there](https://laporcupina.tumblr.com/post/632913767642152960/weft-domenika-marzione-domarzione-the-old)


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